Back on the pills and still confused...

ON MONDAY NIGHT I didn't sleep for a very long time. Tonkie Ears the mouse was pinging about the kitchen like crazy. I eventually went to bed after it had got light. Then I was up before midday.

On Tuesday night I finally caved in and took my antischizophrenia pills. My head has been going increasingly crazed ~ in the literal sense of cracked into zigzaggy shards, like crazy paving. I don't "hear" many "voices" nowadays in the way you might expect: that someone is talking when nobody is there. These days I hear random syllables, and they push and pull through my brains shaking them up as they go in a pneumatic kind of way. They feel sometimes distract me quite a lot. Sometimes I hear my name over and over. Sometimes they say "doo-doo-daa-be-do"; or random things like "trotter donkey". Sometimes they sound like something muttered, and I only catch the last word or two. I also heard my own thoughts spoken by strange voices in my head. Sometimes they echo around, as if I think them and somebody else repeats the last. The "hallucinations" if I can call them that, are much lower grade than they used to be. It took a few weeks off the antipsychotic pills to get as loud and as distinct as they are now. The longer I continued not taking them the more the voices came back. Which is depressing when I think about it in my rational self as it means I'm still mad and I don't like being crazy. I don't like having to take pills just to be more sane than mad (they never worked 100%). And I don't know when I would ever get a life back; on them or off them.

The pills are so powerful I was in bed before 11pm. I slept right through and woke up feeling like it was 6 or 7am; but it was half past eleven. But I did't feel any saner than normal. Random syllables were echoing around and I sat in my blue velvet armchair and pondered where on earth my life is going.

I don't feel so terribly depressed now (or manic). I feel a kind of scattered distraction. If my dr hadn't told me I had a schizophrenic sort of thing going on I'm not sure I'd have been able to match what he told me with what I've read with what I've experienced. I don't think I'd be able to explain. I was never quite sure that what happens doesn't happen to everyone. I don't remember it ever happening to me before some point in my mid 20s, when Prozac originally set it off. A psychiatric person told me that one of the phenomena is a common symptom in certain mental states; it's called "thought echo".

No illicit drugs have ever caused anything like that, by the way. I only "heard voices" on drugs three times that I know of (you can only know that happeed by reviewing your experience and realizing that something you took to be real at the time could only have been a hallucination, which takes quite some concentration and insight to achieve).

So this is what's been happening. I've given in and taken psychiatric meds again. I know at least one person in NA would consider that "using" if I told them. NA can take a hike. In their collective experience hallucinations only occur when you're on drugs but in the past years I've hallucinated much more off drugs than on them, and the hallucinations have a different quality. LSD, for example, typically evokes intricate geometric designs, not voices. It makes you see abstract things, not actual objects, as I did in my manic swings. It's mania that made me hallucinate floridly. Mania lights up the brain like a christmas tree ~ brain scans have shown this. In that state just about anything that happens happens to you more vividly. I say "just about" because in that state I was impervious to cold. I never noticed my windows were wide open in January until my hands seized up enough to cause difficulties typing.

I got up too late to go to NA last night. I got to my methadone chemist just minutes before they closed. The post office was shut already so I couldn't have withdrawn "B money" (gear money) even if I'd wanted to.

Those antipsychotic tablets have really done me in. I feel heavy-limbed and unsteady and I very nearly got the bus 2 stops to my methadone chemists because I couldn't handle the thought of walking there.

So that's today for ya. I just want to go to bed again. I hate being on pills. It's bad enough being on methadone which keeps me physically OK, without having to take something else to be mentally OK. Most people are mentally fine on methadone ~ so why I shouldn't be too..? Does anybody know enough about this to comment? I don't get why I of all people should be more sane on heroin than off it.

I've got to go now. That awful game show where people pick boxes with random amounts of money inside is on and I've got to change channels. Cheery-bye now...

;-)


THE ROYLE FAMILY: Baby David's Christening Party
This is my favourite Royle FAmily episode of all. Everyone is drunk:





PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY OF RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-prescriber



RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-taker; she describes 4mg as far too much ~ 4mg is my dose!
also she does look a bit manic, despite all those meds she talks about...

My Experience With Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder: Mental Situation Explained

LOOKING BACK OVER MY LAST FEW POSTS, how miserable was I?! Misery and suicidal ideation left, right and centre. Yes I have been very unhappy of late. I basically feel ill all the time. And yet I don't feel I'm depressed. I feel like nothing is wrong with me, that I'm a time-waster, a malingerer and a fraud and I don't deserve help. Yet looking at my life I'm in desperate need of something. Most people would call it "help". But how can I accept it?

I question why on earth I ran to a doctor in my "elevated mood" of yore.

But that isn't true. I didn't run to any doctor while manic. What happened was I went manic-depressed ~ BOTH in the same week. The walls started talking to me LOUD. I had the most severely mislaid lost weekend of my life. My sense of hearing suddenly went ten times more acute than normal. It was like living in a house without walls. Everything anyone said or did in any room I heard full-on, like the bizarrest radio play. Everybody on the street. My next door neighbours even. I heard conversations, chatter, sex and a sawing noise like somebody constantly going at a piece of wood. When cars rushed down the street they whooshed echoing into a cyberdelic vortex of sound. And I was hallucinating auditorily vividly. At one point I heard voices speaking Spanish and Chinese. At another it was as if somebody had strewn fifty or so radios all on different channels spewing music, spouting speech all babbling and jangling at once. My mood zoomed and soared and I saw visual spectaculars: the northern lights in full colour in my own living room. This is the most floridly psychotic I have ever been. Although I'd woken up feeling so dire I lay on the floor for four hours before eventually mustering energy to get out of bed, have a cursory shower and heave myself up the road to collect methadone.



I couldn't sleep all weekend. Neither could I eat. I remember drinking tomato soup straight from the tin, cold. Something that looked like a cross between fur and grass was growing out of the top. I knew it wasn't actually there, but that didn't help it go away.

Up and down, twisting in and out my moods dipped and soared. I was cycling in what psychiatrists call a type of mixed bipolar state. And I wasn't on drugs. I was NOT on drugs, this is how my brain reacted to "normality". This is what kept me using for so many years. Untoward mental symptoms, only now they'd gone truly spectacular.

The next few days I felt not only down but injured. I curled up in a chair by day seeing visions of myself in prison, full of guilt, imprisoned for the rest of my life. I didn't want to die: my life was over already.

One day I was perfectly blank. Another day I was depressed. Some friends came round wanting to score. I was totally averse to drugs by this time. They used my dealer and I partook nothing. But I got into their car and experienced a rush like suddenly coming up on Ecstasy full-on. I couldn't stop babbling.The more stressed I got ~ and I got very stressed indeed ~ the higher my mood soared. Nothing this intense had ever happened to me before.

I knew that first weekend that something had gone drastically wrong. I phoned my Mum who was already shocked, having seen me bombed out of my head on dodgy benzoated heroin. She had phoned my druggieworker in horror so they had a dialogue going. I told my Mum to tell my Worker I had been hearing voices. The worker called me on Monday morning. I got a psychiatrist's appointment that Thursday. Seeing a psychiatrist is always stressful. I was particularly stressed. On the ride down a black girl was very obviously talking about me and insulting me repeatedly. I was very angry and kept my hands to myself though I felt like throwing her downstairs. I paced back and forth in the medical building, knowing it would hype me up but destroy anxiety. By the time the doctor saw me I was more hyper than I realized. If you want to see the state I was in watch the video on my sidebar "manic episode: Trisch goes nuts" ~ I was in that type of state. A markedly elevated mood, racing thoughts, rapid speech. Knowing the doctor wanted to know what happened, how much, how long, how intense, what it felt like, how I felt, I told him all this in one uninterrupted stream of consciousness. He only asked three questions in the entire session. To my ranting banging "you can't say I'm manic; I've only been like this six days and the diagnostic criteria say seven" he replied "what do you know about schizophrenia?" I answered "it's not caused by a mood and it's a psychosis"... At home his question came back to haunt me and I wondered whether I did have schizophrenia. And I cried.

I stayed off heroin, went down into a depression. Went back on heroin for a week. Wasn't impressed. Back to methadone. My mood was still cycling. One Sunday I was depressed, hearing voices and wandering aimlessly on the streets, too unhappy to enter my own front door. I went home, slept and woke up the next day in a markedly elevated mood. I remember queueing for my money in the post office. By the till they have shiny bags covered in rainbow holograms. One had acid-smiley faces. I was transfixed by the bright colours and depth of texture. I felt wonderful and sensual, the way I used to on Ecstasy. Though I would never in a million years have dropped an E in order to appreciate goods in the post office!

I'm not sure I slept that night. Next morning my hearing had gone hyper-acute again. A man turned up on our garden path jabbering into a mobile phone about having moved my bed around. I lay there thinking WHAT??! All day, I felt irritable, angry. As I was about to leave for NA I heard two voices. In one ear "nervous breakdown"; in the other "schizophrenia". Schizophrenia again. This put me on a real downer. I stomped down the road, caught the bus and endured loud conversations about my background, my reputation, my school records from other passengers. At this time I was getting well meaning but off-beam comments telling me to go to NA or AA every single day. I don't think anyone realized what I was actually going through. One person even said "I used to hear voices too on my way to meetings" this same person criticized me for sitting in a meeting for five minutes then upping and leaving. Maybe their mental condition was markedly different from mine. But hallucinating floridly and poor attentionspan tend to go hand in hand. We were cooped together in this meeting. Everyone smelled of periods and semen. I thought the man next to me was going to pick my pocket. The man giving the chair kept staring at me. And the meeting was so packed there was a chair in the way of the door. I couldn't stuck this out for nearly 20 minutes and eventually left, causing marked disturbance. But I didn't care. I just needed fresh air.

I didn't sleep at all that night. My mood soared higher and higher. My house was a mess and I was supposed to be cleaning it but I couldn't focus myself enough to clean anything. There used to be a dual-diagnosis meeting I always referred to as Nutter Club. It took place once a week. Naomi, the lady who runs it is expert at dealing with people with severe mental health issues. Most people there seemed to be bipolar. A couple of schizophrenics turned up, but they say far less. Naomi had met me and we'd spoken in depth a few times over the previous couple of years. She knew that I believed I had something bipolar going on. Not necessarily bipolar disorder. But I was definitely on the so-called "bipolar spectrum" as it's very trendily known nowadays.



I remember her saying one time between the florid stage of my condition and my actually getting a diagnosis "you know and I know that it's not drug-related but you've got to stay away from everything so the doctor knows that too". This particular comment came back to haunt me. On the one hand I didn't want to be thought of as a druggie timewaster, going nuts because I'd used too much. On the other I was terrified of the term "bipolar disorder" I didn't want the label slapped across my forehead. I didn't even consider that it could have been something else, something worse...

I was in such a state this day I went to the nutter club. I had been dancing about my kitchen in a state of disarray. My clothes were dirty, my hair unwashed; I was thoroughly unkempt. I had great difficulty getting myself and my keys and my Oyster card (for the bus) and a little bit of money and my phone all in my pockets with my brain flying all over the place at several thousand miles per hour, on no sleep (which I didn't really need, though it felt strange to someone used to sleeping sixteen hours or more a day in my depressions...) I arrived at the nutter club thinking my mood was fairly normal, that I was just a bit hyped up. In a group with three other nutters I was unable to contain myself from laughing hysterically. People tried to talk and I kept stopping them saying WHAT??! They might as well have been talking backwards: gibberish. Naomi said "look I think you need to be seen by a doctor" so the meeting closed early and she took me to the mental hospital which was just down the road. I kept asking "do I have to speak as slowly as possible and not wave my arms about?" (ie not act manic) she said "oh no they're so full you don't have to worry about being sectioned" (involuntarily committed). The only thing that could have got me sectioned, as I understand it, would be direct, focused threats of violence or active suicidal behaviour with a specific plan. I was seeing this doctor because I had known for years that something was wrong, that I'd had bipolar symptoms and nobody listened. Nobody took me seriously. i got the distinct impression they thought I was lying. Trying to make myself seem more interesting.

In the mental reception my mood soared higher than ever before. Naomi introduced me to a colleague who looked just like a woman off the television. I peed in a cup and sure enough: no speed, no crack, no cannabis. Nothing except heroin METHADONE and benzos, both of which are downers, not uppers. The benzos were from my attempt a week earlier to give up alcohol for once and for all. But I never managed it.

Naomi and TV Girl said goodbye and I was left with a depressed middle aged man and a depressed black girl who kept phoning someone and screaming her boring personal problems down the phone.

Meanwhile my head was going more manic than it had ever gone before. I went through double doors to a corridor where the walls and doors and ceiling were echoing with scores of conversations. My head went from racing into complete overdrive. The words in my head broke off. So that "I'm going too fast" might stop with "going", the "-ing" broke off: ing-ing-ing-ing-in-in-in-INININININ" whooshing round with spectacular speed.I was losing my mind and the only way I could keep a grip was by yelling these syllables as my head disintegrated into random noise.

I calmed myself down by running through the alphabet out loud ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO.... over and over again. Pacing back and forth avoiding the bad letters. A is for acid, that's bad. B is for brown ~ heroin. That's bad. C is like the sea. It's brilliant in the sun; it's calm. That's good. I flew through them quickly and the black girl was staring at me. I didn't care. And I knew the nurses wouldn't be observing me.

Eventually I saw a kindly man who introduced himself as a psychiatric social worker. He pointed out, very patiently, that we had 45 minutes to take my entire psychiatric history. This was quite some challenge. When was I first depressed? In childhood. In my teens. It first became a major problem at university. Suicide? Yes twice. This got me raging about tetracyclic antidepressants. I took 8 pills and a bottle of vodka. Then I thought "fuck it" and downed a bottle of sixty heavy strength lofepramine. I puked them up almost straight away. The coating was still on the pills in the vomit which was everywhere. All over the floor. On my clothing. Down my hair.

If only I'd gone for Prothiaden/dothiepin I might be dead now. Merely touching on this subject sent me crazy with pent up anger, self-hatred, frustration and rage. I had to enumerate every upsetting, depressing experience. Being yelled at on railway station platforms by people who thought I was going to jump. Being waved at BY THE DRIVER of a high speed train. I've mentioned this before but it gets me to this day. How did he see me? How did he know at close to one hundred miles per hour that I, acting as normally as anybody in such a situation could, wanted to kill myself under a train?

When my depression reached one of its all-time lows I had a persistent idea that the train would hit me and I wouldn't really die. I'd just lie on the trackside in the cold, in the rain, in agony forever, trains rushing past and nobody ever healing me.

Having to dredge through this psychiatric history in the highly impressionable manic state was traumatic beyond words. Now that I FINALLY have a psychiatrist and proper notes and a diagnosis etc etc etc I should never ever have to go through this again. If I ever had to do it in an emergency situation I think I would walk out rather than seek treatment. It's just not worth recalling all that. People seem to assume that I dwell on my past. But I don't. I only dwell as I write. Then I'm in another zone.

Mild thought echo: age 23. Mild antidepressant-induced hypomania: age 23. Natural hypomania: age 27. First heard voices: early 30s.

A long, slow, slide downwards.

The psychiatrist looked stunningly beautiful. Her legs were shiny. The lights outside looked amazing. She asked more questions; this time about the present: how fast was I? How high? How irritated? How many voices? What did they say? How little sleep? She prescribed zopiclone 7.5mg ~ the best sleeping pill I've ever tried.

I walked for two hours then took the bus home. This night I slept for all of five hours. I hadn't slept this long in days. Next day I was even more euphoric. I felt grandiose and grand. I was out of this world. The world was left behind. I hate this world in both phases of my "illness" I never want to be in it.

The mania intensified until I felt like a tiger roaring. I swaggered up and down the streets. When people crossed me, as they often did, it was sufficient merely to glare at them. They seemed to spring backwards. People seemed to make way, clear paths, back off. Yes they looked terrified, but that was a new thing and it felt fantastic. A confirmation of my higher power.

I was obsessed by energy and power. My willingness to drop drugs turned into an aversion for drugs of all kinds. Taking crack or E or speed was the saddest thing you could do. By this time I'd gone higher than I'd ever been on any drug. The drugs seemed a pale imitation of reality. I tried heroin towards the end of the mania and it did little except make me sleepy and racy at the same time.

Over the weeks my mood went through a roughly seven day cycle. Seven days flying high; seven days lower. Sometimes hypomanic, sometimes vaguely depressed. Then up again. I thought this would never end.

My first few days of mania were by far the most intense. My psychiatrist prescribed the antipsychotic risperidone. As I came down gradually over the weeks it began to eat away at me that I didn't even know the name of this very obvious mental condition. I thought it was bipolar. I could see that I was high sometimes; low at other times. Surely that was bipolar disorder? No. The S-word returned to haunt me. SCHIZOAFFECTIVE. That's what my doctor, a consultant psychiatrist, thinks I am. Meaning I matched the full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and mania simultaneously. He said my psychosis was more florid than most manic psychosis. I think he also recognized my longstanding issues of self-care. People have long been deceived because I'm articulate, that because I'm able to talk and to touch type that it somehow follows that my house will be in order, my life will be in order that all will be perfect. it's not perfect; it's a mess. During the worst of my illness I couldn't even handle money. I just lost it. Keeping track of my housekeys was a major hassle.

Most people who go manic feel sociable and sexy. I felt neither. I was just as reclusive manic as depressed. I tried to use my hyperosity and energy to clear up my scruffy house, but I couldn't stick with it. Unsociability and avolition are key characteristics of schizophrenia. If you can be manic and still have these things going on they're extremely deep seated. Realizing this has done nothing to help my recent depression. I know I can't choose my illness from a psychiatric Chinese takeaway menu. Though I cried because I had schizophrenia, there are still a thousand physical illnesses I'd less rather have. By itself schizophrenia isn't necessarily a horrible condition. It makes me feel dissociated, unreal, bizarre and poetic. Occasionally I feel paranoid, but nearly always in public places. When I'm on my own I'm OK. It's a big reason why I keep myself to myself. Other people only bring me down.

I've been feeling depressed for several weeks now; it's not the worst depression in the world but it will not shift. It won't go away. It's eroding my self-esteem, making me feel worthless and guilty. Making me want to be dead. I've spent years in this state, so it's like Welcome Home.

This is the state that kept me using heroin for so long. I used every day I could afford to last week. Which puts me into desperation. Addicted and stuck, not coping, back on heroin a drug that I gave up for weeks on end during mania... back in the morass. I can't cope. I don't want to go on. I really can't cope, I'm not coping at all. I'm thoroughly dirty, living in a mess that the council send a sterm lady once a month to complain about. I'm waiting to be housed in a mental health hostel because my coping skills are so bad. I'm 39 years old yet life is reelling backwards. I've done the exact opposite of scrounging. None of the help that was meant to be out there for me came until I had a full-blown psychotic break. I know of people who have faked schizophrenia and psychosis to get housed, to get sick benefit and DLA and they make me so angry because even getting to my appointments feels like a major stress, yet these people are acting, they're quite capable. That's why I feel like I should be dead, I'm only a drain on society. If they cut off my money I couldn't work because there's no job you can do at your own pace. No job that accommodates someone who sleeps more than sixteen hours and NEEDS that sleep, every single day when the depression intensifies. I'd have to keep myself clean and tidy and get there on time. I can't handle looking people in the eye. I deceive people on the phone because I modulate my voice, but I can't do face to face when Im sick.

The jobs I'd most like to do are writer of novels which I'd be able to do even when quite sick. Even when I can't focus to follow a book by another person, I'm able to write ~ as you see from my blog. I don't believe I'm the greatest but I do have a uniqueness and that's what I'd aim to harness.

In more down-to-earth jobs painter-decorator is one I'd like to do. Many years ago I had an intuition that whatever career I went for, it'd have to be low stress. This coincides with all the advice I've read about schizoaffective disorder. Stress makes my condition very much worse. In mania I literally feel something like an accelerator, foot to the floor and a WHOOOSH!! In a normal mood, which I'm hardly ever in, I get horrible anxiety. And I still can have psychotic experiences when I'm in a normal mood. This is how my condition differs from bipolar disorder, where the psychosis occurs only at the polar extremes of mood. In depression everything feels like too much and I can't take it on.

Anna Grace and I have a lot in common. Anna has several years' history of intravenous opiate abuse. Tar heroin, white heroin and Dilaudid (prescription hydromorphone) being her favourite drugs. Her mental diagnosis is bipolar disorder but she's like me. Nearly always noticably up or down. Hardly ever "normal".



Most people with bipolar have episodes, which last weeks. But they end and the mood between episodes is neither low nor high: it's totally normal. But Anna and I are always depressed and when we're not depressed we're manic or at least hyper. We've both had psychosis. Neither of us function very well off opiates. Only problem is, Anna lives 3851 miles away in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We would like to live together in New York City, but short of a massive lottery win, whats going to make that happen?

Anna is my cyberwife. She's cheating on me with some guy called Jess who does bootycalls, as she calls them. Of course this isn't unfaithfulness, there can be no chastity or commitment over 3851 miles' distance. Still, if I meet Jess in a manic episode I will punch his lights out.

Now you've read some of the story of my mental health. I'm not always sure I'm ill. When guilt gets me bad I can feel like I deserve unhappiness. When I really get severely depressed, which is rare for me, I believe I'm in spiritual crisis rather than depression as such. In the lowest of the lows life is over; there is no life. My highs took me higher than drugs. A feeling of connectedness, of spirituality as my thoughts exploded in starbursts. Impervious to weariness, my body seemed to be turning from physical flesh into spirit. That's what I wanted most of all: to be out of this world. As I say, I hate this world at all times. I don't want to be in it, I want to be out of it. It's the only way of coping I know of.

MANIC EPISODE: "TRISCH GOES NUTS"
Knowing she was going to spend all day cooped up in a car, she was letting off steam before a road trip... The comments at Youtube contain a lot of doubters but this is the only film I've seen captures true manic behaviour:~


FUN WITH BIRDS ON THE BEACH
... and here's the sane Trisch with some very entertaining birds



PS: I've found a new blog by Jane, the mother of a freshly detoxed addict who's troubled by anxiety, depression and insomnia. He's opiate-clean but in a very vulnerable situation. Check out her blog and give Jane some moral support: http://janeinsearchofsanity.blogspot.com.

Early Morning Blues

I DIDN'T POST EARLIER because I was asleep. I tried the Heroin Cure for depression and it worked well enough to get some words out of Valerie, Heroin Queen of Australia (see below) but I woke up around midnight feeling sour as an unripe lime.

Valerie still makes me laugh. In fact anything I write that I think is funny I can laugh at. But nothing else seems to touch me. So you can call Valerie my therapy.

I don't think there is any cure for depression. For laziness I can imagine the drill the psychologist would tell me: write a list, do a few things every day blah blah. I really don't see the point in doing anything.

Normal people seem to take antidepressants and complain that they make them feel "flat" and at best take the edge off depression. With me they most definitely made me euphoric and the depression evaporated entirely. Nothing flat about them! Problem was last time I went on a rollercoaster mood swing that dipped so far down I lost my ability to bullshit the world with a polite happy act, the one we all do. Soon as they set eyes on me people asked what the hell was wrong. So that's antidepressants.

Mood stabilizers do nothing until you're out of an episode. They prevent mood phases recurring. Which is double depressing. Meaning the misery stays and no mania to follow it up. The thought of going manic is my only real hope in life.

Also I can't have lithium because it needs regular blood level checks. And where would they get a vein? I know the side effects and they're ones I'd find particularly disagreeable (feeling cold, tired, visual problems and poor attention span: EXACTLY what bothered me about chronic fatigue syndome. No thanks). There are other mood stabilizers and these are all anticonvulsants: oxcarbazepine, valproate, lamotrigine et al.

I finally finished the quarter bottle of vodka (found in an alleyway on Wednesday afternoon) at around 3am Friday morning. Which just shows what a heavy drinker I am. I had to put it in black coffee to take the vomitsome taste away.

The Chinese Chicken Curry from Morrisons tasted far too strongly of Five Spice Seasoning, which should only be very vaguely in the background. So they got that one totally wrong.

Now I'm craving food yet don't feel physically hungry. The thought of eating makes my head feel mixed up.

I think my problem is what saves me: I can't focus on things. So I don't focus on negativity the way you'd think I might. Stuff about me being murdered or shot to death by firing squad is half tongue in cheek. But only half. I don't know what I actually think about anything, don't want to know.

The one thing that made me focus in life was drug addiction. It focused me on heroin heroin heroin. Heroin was real. The lack of it was a desperate emergency. Heroin heroin. Such an irony that it seemed to keep me sane. Without it I go all over the place. I noticed this years ago, and noticed that in rehab type situations I got extra meds and appeared to monopolize the attention of the counselling staff. Everybody else in there seemed pretty well balanced. And in the second place, they all slept. I was wide awake despite sleeping pills and antipsychotic (given for its sedative properties). Everybody else seemed to sleep like babies.

I never thought this meant I had some mental condition. I just thought it meant I was a big baby who couldn't cope with something everybody else seemed to glide through easily, no matter how difficult they claimed it to be.

A few years ago I would have latched on to any psychiatric diagnosis as an excuse to continue using heroin. These days excuses are not an issue.

I went beyond desperation and to a state where I realized I had two demons to fight. The psychiatric one was considerably bigger and stronger than the drugs one. When you fight with drugs you're fighting yourself. So you and your opponent are equally matched. Having a full-on breakdown is like being slammed in the face by a truck. You can't fight it as such, you can only resist it in a stubborn type of way.

The only time I've truly felt mentally injured was when my mood flew then plummeted several times in the course of a week leaving me catatonic. I actually felt mentally injured then. Usually my system adapts to anything life throws at it. But not that time.

Well I have to go, it's a quarter to six in the morning and I feel like ****. I regret being awake. I'd really like to sleep for ever. I'm scared of getting psychotic depression. I don't care about being psychotic and manic as much but psychotic depressed scares the hell out of me. That would put me straight in the nuthouse.

I'm surprised my druggieworker is taken in by the idea that someone who has insight isn't ill. There are psychiatrists and mental health professionals who have also had psychosis. Their training never stopped them going mad. I knew the basic diagnostic criteria for mania so I was well aware that I was manic when my mood went high. Mania isn't so much a good mood as an accelerated state where you feel very excited, go into overdrive, stop sleeping, get irritable on the one hand and feel poetic on the other, and the self-esteeem soars. Just knowing I was in this state did nothing to make it any less intense. At the peak of it my attention span was so impaired I was basically disabled. I could sign into the computer (it seemed to take an hour to do this; I was on fastforward). I could post. But I could not edit what I said, I could only grasp the gist of comments etc and when I was really out of it I could barely understand the written word at all. I couldn't follow the spoken word either. People seemed to be talking crap all the time. But I'd still rather be manic than depressed. I know it's not much of a choice, but it's the only choice I've got. Providing the mania does come back. Knowing my luck I'll be stuck in misery for ever. The mania is just a torment. Telling me I used to be able to get high not on drugs, that I'll never ever feel happy ever again.

Being as life is torture anyhow, I have decided to have a stab at cleaning up my house and filling out the DLA form. DLA is a benefit for people who are mentally deranged or severely disabled, who need help in their daily lives. Example: if you live in a house full of rubbish, only ever eat food direct from the tin, sleep on the floor in the clothes you wore during the day and cannot be bothered to shower and your doctor thinks you're schizo you should get DLA pretty easily. I don't get it because I was so depressed when it ran out last time I just felt like a fraud. I got no support from anyone in authority: drugs workers etc. They were taken in by my sardonic pose and heroin-saturated brains and thought I needed no help.

Everything changed when I went mad enough that the dr saw it all over me the second I walked into the consulting room. He looked really shocked at the state of me and I thought I was normal! Then the council sent somebody from another department to do a home visit and this person says I have issues of self care.

They say that depression deteriorates the attention, (which it does) but nowhere near as badly as mania. As long as I'm talking (or writing), I can follow my own outpourings. I'm no good with books at the moment but I reckon I could do that DLA form. Problem is I have to FIND it first. I have about five copies but my house is such chaos I haven't a clue where a single one is.

It's very shaming filling in that form. You have to admit what a fuck-up you are. Under diagnosis I have to write schizoaffective disorder which I'm not even sure is correct. I'm not psychotic, I'm just miserable.

On the other hand, I know if they cut me off my benefits, I wouldn't go out and get a job (what employer would possibly have me?), I'd just live on the streets begging for spare change. So I suppose if I keep this in mind I can feel entitled to money. Everyone else seems to get DLA. I don't get it because I was too much of a mess to make a claim.

Well I have to go it's past 6am now. I badly need a cigarette. I really don't know what else to say.

PS: Anna posted up a video of somebody committing suicide the way I'd so it if 10,000mg Seconal weren't available (gun in mouth). He falls down way quicker than people in the movies and blood comes spurting out of his nose. I don't advise anybody watch it who's thin-skinned or easily shocked. The link is here.

The Art of Living and Other Issues

TO START WITH, 2 VIDEOS I SAW LAST NIGHT THAT DISTURBED ME:

BIPOLAR BREAKDOWN ART
How I found this I have no idea. I wasn't looking for bipolar or art but it somehow spewed out of youtube.

I was high on coffee. One single black coffee stopped me sleeping last night. I thought I was doing so well.

It's the last colour picture on part one that I like; it reminds me of visions I have seen when I was out of it (mental out of it not drugs out of it). And it looks like the kind of picture I would draw if I could.

What freaked me out was the energy in that picture. By this time she's gone through paranoia and into grandiosity which is when you're really hyped up. She hadn't slept for seven days straight. Her mind was completely out of control. I somehow related and it scared me.

It pops up at 3 mins 52 it's the blue and yellow one.

[Don't be distracted by my psychedelic mouse: I'm talking about the blue and yellow picture on the Youtube screen Mental Breakdown Part 1 3 mins 52 in.]

Even her phrases like "cycling up" do my head in. Makes me think of a helterskelter. I spiralled up very high and stood on top of the immense cyclone, I stood exalted as high as any human being can ever go.

Then she talks about hallucinations and her art reminds me of my visions:

The last vision I saw, as opposed to a hallucination was when a blank wall suddenly turned into a moving abstract film in full colour. I had had about 4 hours sleep in 4 days (ie I'd done 2 days averaging 2 hours per day then 2 days with no sleep at all). Nothing has ever made me stay up for a week. Most I've ever done is 4 days on that nasty antideressant mirtazapine (Remeron). It made me manic then depressed.
I related to what this woman said being manic AND depressed AND psychotic and the energy and the not sleeping she talked about frightened me. And then I fell asleep. Around seven o'clock this morning.

Incidentally the blank wall was in the mental hospital reception. Where I saw that beautiful psychiatrist with shiny stockings. I was having immense trouble making myself understood beyond simply answering whatever questions were put to me. I was told I kept changing the subject. So no way could I explain about the wall breaking out into a fabulous movie.

I tried to tell her "Usually I need my sleep, but I don't need my sleep now because I have so much energy. Nonetheless it would be good if I had some zopiclone to sleep because then I could have some semblance of a sleep cycle. My body gets tired easily, even though I can't feel it now." And it was just impossible. I got the word Zopiclone out (a sleeping pill) and she gave me a 1 week supply.
That was before I went even HIGHER and started turning from human being (as I felt it) into energy-being.

As the mania came down I suddenly had this sense of being in my body again. My feet felt literally on the ground.

I had been living with the windows as wide open as they'd go in January. Hadn't realized I was cold until my hands froze up too much to type.

If you wonder why all this talk NOW it's because I'm scared of going mad. I'm scared of being sane. I can't handle that one either. I'm scared of being on heroin. Scared of not being on it. Scared of dying. Not scared of being dead.

How much of a mess is that?





I watched Gone With The Wind last night and it's really good.

I woke up this afternoon and have had no alcohol today. I went out and bought chocolate milk. Ironically a half litre of this is more expensive than a half litre of 7.5% ABV cyder!!

I didn't ring the dealer yesterday, didn't ring anyone today. Or see anyone. Or use anything bar a swig of methadone.

So Im doing good. I'm living on black coffee and the minimum food. I have about 4 cups a day (I say this in case anyone assumes "living on coffee" means 40 cups!). Yesterday I had one chicken tikka pilau and 2 full chicken legs. That has to be about 1200 calories. I have to watch what I eat, I don't want to get fat. I find eating offputting when I remember how I used to enjoy certain food directly after IV heroin. Heroin gave the most amazing savour to food. Part of me feels "how can I ever eat again". I knew I ought to work on breaking that heroin-food association while I was still on it.

Now my head has suddenly switched into "not using anymore" mode. The mode, but not the mood (the "elevated mood") I got into before. When I dropped heroin for several weeks on end.

I wish I could live. Actually live. Not just be alive but master the art of living. I know this is my challenge in life, but I don't even know how to start, let alone how to go on...


I hope this post isn't too much of a mess: I can't be doing with editing today

Illustrated: a psychedelic mouse! Yes a psychedelic mousie ha ha

ANNA GRACE: the way this guy talks is the way everybody sounded to me at one point:
http://gledwoodvideo.blogspot.com/2011/04/psychosis.html




HERE IS A TUNE!!
this is Elevated Mood

IT'S EXALTED

Schizoaffective Disorder

AS REGULAR READERS will know I have been diagnosed with a relatively rare psychiatric condition that affects approximately one person in two hundred and accounts for approximately five percent of all patients with serious mental illness. Not much is known about this condition. Varying opinions put have it as a variety of schizophrenia, or a variety of bipolar disorder, or a cross between the two or "the unlucky convergence of two psychoses" (that is that I am bipolar and schizophrenic at the same time.) The name of this condition is schizoaffective disorder.

The name "schizoaffective" originated in 1933. And as I say, nobody knows quite what it is or how it comes about. And though it is widely considered to be a midpoint between type 1 bipolar and schizophrenia on a "psychosis spectrum" it is acknowledged that schizoaffective disorder "has a flavour all of its own". For example, schizoaffectives seem particularly prone to "seeing things" as well as "hearing things". For example, when I'm ill I can see animals in the floor. Just as one can see faces and forms in clouds, I can see them not only in clothes an carrier bags but in floors, on walls and even on my computer screen. I sometimes see pairs of eyes at the bottom staring back at me.

When I was in the mental hospital years ago I saw an angel staring in at me through an upstairs window. At the time I had contact lens problems so I had in one constact lens. So through one eye I saw a blurry angel and through the other the angel was clear. Just as if a real form was at the window staring in at me. What shocks me today is that I never saw fit to tell my doctor about this. I think I was minded at the time to get out of there as quickly as possible without saying too much.

Oh and just to complicate matters there are two subtypes of schizoaffective disorder: a depressive type and a bipolar type. My hyper, manic phases are higher than my depressive lows are low. It's totally normal for mania to be more florid an psychotic than depression but my mania has reached, for short periods of time, the outer extreme of how manic it is possible to go. I'm so grateful that I don't go as depressed as you can go. And, because its quite possible to be schizophrenic and depressed at the same time, it's necessary to have more serious depression than I do to qualify as socalled "unipolar" or depression-only schizoaffective. My friend Pinky is depressive schizoaffective. She gets the faces in the floor thing; but her depressive episodes are generally worse than mine. And I don't think she's just describing them more "dramatically" I think she really does get more intensely depressed. Another difference is that her system will tolerate antidepresants while mine goes haywire on them. My mood cycles quickly. I can be quite horribly depressed, suicidally so, for just one day (an would usually have some degree of mania each side) whereas Pinky's depression is like mine used to be: constant lasting months on end. (Some of my depressions lasted years on end.) Another difference is that if you plotted it on a graph, my depression would be a wobbly line "under the water" as it were (that is under the line of "normality" in other words it used to cycle even back then. Now I cycle between high and low rather than merely different levels of low with infrequent flashes of high (I've had bipolar [manic] symptoms off and on (mostly off) since my mid-20s.)

I found the best schizoaffective stuff by googling "schizoaffective bipolar". The best link so far is from McManWeb: http://www.mcmanweb.com/psychosis.html

I've had a couple of comments expressing surprise that I'm not on a mood-stabilizer as well as an antipsychotic. I now know why. My doctor suspected I was schizophrenic not bipolar when he first saw me "ill". So he treated me using antischizophrenia drugs to see what progress I made. And sure enough I have stopped hearing voices and my mania is damped down. But it doesn't seem to do much against depression. I'd rather NOT be on a mood-stabilizer as no mood swings would just make my life too vanilla for words. If he thinks I'm OK on just risperidone, I'd rather go on purely on risperidone, experiencing some mania, because I love being a bit manic. It's like purely natural excitement (this is why it doesn't fit any drug signature if you wanted to be really precise about it, it doesn't match any upper even though being hyper is like being on uppers. I'd say being mildly hypomanic is like being on a bit of amphetamine; being moderately manic is like cocaine; being ultra high is like trippy Ecstasy type drugs; you could go raving in this state on nothing and actually be the most vibed-up person in there). Mania does take you higher than drugs. You just have to think: how many times have you or anyone you knew thought they literally Ruled the World, or felt like they were literally changing into an angel, because they were high on drugs? These feelings are par for the course in severe mania. In other words severe bipolar (or schizoaffective) takes you higher than drugs ever do. You'd fit out, foam at the mouth, and eventually die on uppers before you ever got that high. Which explains how I could stay awake as my head eventually went into a brainfrying high when on drugs, as I say, you'd just fit out or even die.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it!

Well I'm finding out what I can about this mysterious syndrome named bipolar schizoaffective. I can see that I match it perfectly. All I saw before was that I was bipolar. As a "patient" it's the pattern of ups and downs that is easier to grasp than the fact that you actually are in a mania or a depression or a (mixed state). The mind has a way of convincing itself it's not severely ill so I was in depression for months and seriously considered myself not to be ill and not to be worthy of any psychiatric diagnosis. That would have explained behaviour that was to me inexplicable.

My psychiatrist is a consultant who specializes in dual diagnosis (that is diagnosing people with drug problems and serious mental conditions) and he can weed out drug psychosis from bipolar or schizophrenic psychosis. Schizoaffective disorder has socalled negative or deficit symptoms for example you can spend hours or days staring into space. This is a part of my illness. I avoid social contact with people and I have impaired motivation, meaning I'm content to do very little, despite being largely off heroin. All the stuff that was blamed on heroin turns out to be "what I was like anyhow". As I myself was starting to suspect. I only had to look around at other addicts to see that no matter how badly addicted they were, they weren't in the mess I was in. They tended to be experts at taking psychiatrists for a ride which is why my "not bothering to try" attitude got me written off. I wasn't going to come in presenting a picture of misery just because I felt down. They only got a florid primary-coloured portrait of me when I was manic, highly expansive and unrestrained and very vocal. Then they saw who I really was. Acting manic must be one of thee most difficult psychiatric states to "put on" because you can't fake the presence of excess energy. It's just too exhausting. Another sign that I was real not faking. I grew to suspect that they considered me a fake or an exaggerator. I used to say that I needed to address my mood issues and I'd get nothing but nods and more nods. Then I went floridly mad and suddenly help is forthcoming. I'm just annoyed it had to get THAT BAD before anyboy listened.

I have sudden flashes of insight as I did today where I suddenly realize how deeply messed up some of the stuff is that I come out with. The glib way I talk about death. It really disturbs me to see that I'm this person in such a mess that I'd say the things I say. If it wasn't for my "no embarrassment, no deletion" policy I'd take a lot of it out to save my own face. But I just leave it all in. It's my own record of where I've been, that's my main motivation for blogging when "ill". My blog posts are my own postcards from the edge. Postcards to myself more than to you. I just am horrified at some of the things I thought. What was going through my head? It's sad, very sad to be this person so desperate he's talking about death as if killing myself shows some kind of character strength, when actually it shows desperation or even delusion. I'm much more disturbed about this than about my using heroin every now and then. All I learned from today's gear was that even though it was top-notch by today's low standards, it's still not doing the job it used to do.

All I can imagine is that being on antipsychotics that have squashed my more extreme manic symptoms and stopped me hearing voices or feeling dissociated from my own thought process (so my thoughts don't feel like my own, they feel like something I'm hearing on the radio). Risperidone stops most of this; heroin used to keep my mood on a far more even keel than it otherwise was, an it did a great deal to keep me sane. This is pretty obvious when you consider how badly I lost it when I suddenly jacked gear in last December. I had the most florid psychotic episode with both high and low mood, of my entire life. I have never ever hallucinated auditorily that vividly. Not on drugs, not on anything. When I became manic in February I was far higher, yet less "psychotic" in that I hallucinated less. All this is schizoaffective stuff. Unlike a bipolar person, I have psychotic-type experiences not related to a high or low mood. I remember some years ago feeling heavily stoned on cannabis with very LOUD thoughts, mild auditory halluciantions and racing thoughts from a COMMON COLD. This was while Maple Syrup my "it's all down to drugs" worker, the one who tried to bully me, the one I sacked. If Maple Syrup had even glanced at my files she'd have seen that I was 38 years old and hadn't become addicted to heroin until age 28. Meaning that I had 28 years of issues at that time. Meaning it was ridiculous to pin all my troubles on a drug. Meaning my intuition was right and hers wrong. I always did envisage myself losing it when I eventually came off. This wasn't "bad attitude" it was me seeing myself the way an insurance assessor would. That every single time without exception that I'd detoxified, dropped dose or switched medications I had experienced manic-depressive symptoms to some degree. I got extra meds in rehab BOTH times I was in there. I spent hours in the counselling rooms crying BOTH times. I spent all night wide awake every single night unlike everyone else who said they didn't sleep and promptly took up snoring for hours on end, BOTH TIMES. In other words something was going on with me that wasn't with them. If everybody had been as upset as I was they'd have employed a team of twelve full-time counsellors every day to meet demand. Somehow other people seemed to do a methadone or dihydrocodeine taper and though they had low points they didn't crack up. Yet somehow I did.

What I didn't expect was to go as floridly crazy as I did, or as rapidly as I did (literally the day I left heroin behind was the day I started hallucinating so floridly I literally could not tell whether I was thinking or hearing, I experienced that many voices.

In a way I look at myself from afar and feel sorry for someone who is a desperate mess. Self-pity is only useful when it gets you the help you need. Otherwise it's a waste of energy. My energy is going into finding out more about this mysterious condition with which I live.

It's diagnosed differently in the USA by the way to the rest of the world.
The World Health Organization's ICD-10 specifies that bipolar and schizophrenic symptoms are experienced together or within a few days of one another; the American DSM IV-TR insists that I must magically be free of any and all marked mood swings for a fortnight and still exhibit psychotic features. So whether or not I'm merely severely "bipolar 1" in America, I've no idea.

I know I have all the features associated with a poor recovery: mood-incongruent hallucinations, deficit symptoms between the severe mood swings, rapid cycling of the mood and mood switches directly between manic and depressed... all these are associated with poor medication response and a poorer prognosis. So whether or not I'm bipolar or schizoaffective in whatever country I am at the "severe end" of "severe mood disorders" and without medication become "severely manic". This word "severe" is cropping up far too often for comfort and it's my googling that has brought it up.

What I'm after now is to be "severely clean" with a "severe recovery" from "severe mental illness"... so there we go.

"Severely well". That's what I wish to be.


Illustrated: schizoaffectives can see amazing things in trunks of gnarly trees!
And I bet you can, too. Especially in the top one!



SCHIZOAFFECTIVE DISORDER

this guy says he took amphetamines as a youngster; but his mother is bipolar
i took amphetamines (etc) as a youngster; my mother has recurrent depression



this one is more like me
someone asked what i talk like this is the accent i have without the northern bits
without medication i go through periods of hearing voices every day
and i get depersonalization too (that means nothing is real)

Ideas and/or Advice, Please!

I'VE BEEN TRYING TO SORT OUT MY BENEFITS STUFF TODAY. They paid me the grand total of £21 this week; I've no idea why. So now I know the correct number I have to ring back tomorrow when they're open. I also am meant to tell them I have schizoaffective disorder. I got a letter a while back that seemed irrelevant but it said underneath that any change in your medical condition must be notified. I don't think the name makes any difference but it might mean I get treated a bit different (if anything, better). They don't seem to quibble so much with severe mental illness whereas depression they subject you to a test to see how depressed you actually are. With this I don't see what test they can do, I just feel too confused a lot of the time to do a lot of basic things. Sad but true. I don't know how I'm going to rise above this one. Depression I fought against but mania you can't fight against it's too intense and also feels nice most of the time, so I don't know what to do. And the schizo-bit in schizo-affective just feels too weird for words so I don't know how to dea with it. Not very good I know but true. They might push me down a pit with people sword fighting like people on television now but I don't know how I'll survive. See I feel confused these thoughts come in my head and I push them out but I push out everything else too so I dont know what to keep in there. This is why I get ill, because I don't understand. I try. I do try. But I feel confused.

Does anybody out there know about schizoaffective disorder and what things I can do self-help wise? PLEASE. Anybody? If you can direct me to a good website or just a forum I'd be ever so grateful. I'm floundering about knowing I have "symptoms" of this "tripolar disorder" (because there are 3 things I get: mania, depression and schizophrenia) and knowing broadly which symptom and experience is flavoured with what, but I don't know what to DO. I want to know what to DO. And why I should do it? And what I might achieve... Please anybody who knows please answer. You don't need to be a fellow sufferer or an expert I'm just after ideas. Remember I have had depression for years and am glad I followed my inkling not to indulge in books that didn't mention Seasonal Affective (SAD) or bipolar. Because I've always thought my depression was partly psychological and partly biological. Even though I hadn't a clue I was schizoaffective until the dr told me so, I've followed the right path, where you accept your illness has a biological component. Purely herbal tea and counselling based stuff just ain't gonna cut it with my illness. I accept I need to take meds. I can feel when I haven't taken them, usually. Apart from Saturday night when I honestly forgot my pill (I'm on one pill now; 1x4mg risperidone rather than 2x2mg, which are too easy to get confused over) I wasn't messing about I really did forget to take it. And for once didn't get "a free coke binge" I just felt nothing bar a sluggish depression I've been in for days. Depression which now has a slight excited tinge in the background. I'm hoping this means a mood switch is occurring.

Yes I used HEROIN today but it did nothing. It was so weak. I wish I wouldn't do it. It doesn't take away "psychotic" things (which I don't really have today) and it doesn't dampen down my bad moods any more so I wish I'd get it THROUGH MY THICK HEAD THAT I'M WASTING MY TIME.

Im pissed off with NA because I shared even though it fucking hurt to do so I still shared something that is personal that I don't have to share and not one fucking person gave any response except the kind of response you get when they know you're using drugs still. I mean I told them I had bipolar mood swings and not one person could think of one faintly constructive thing to say about that.

I don't know what I was expecting. Certainly not "there there" type crap but something. I expected something and I don't think my expectations were unreasonable. Considering nearly ALL bipolar people use drugs which means there must be a lot of manic depression "in the rooms" as they say I expected more. So I was right when I realized NA was NOT for me. They cannot help me, they do not help me. Only seductive thing about NA is the attitude that taking medication is wrong, so I can "not use" my antipsychotics and have "a free coke binge" on them. That is a free manic episode, even a short one for a couple of days. But I'm trying to be grown up and responsible, I don't know why, but I am. Am trying.

I felt misunderstood by them when I took up going again and I still feel misunderstood and unappreciated.

Bear in mind I have been coming to NA for over 10 years, since I very first saw a problem developing, so I know NA, know their philosophy and their ways and feel let down, now that I genuinely want to be clean and serene I feel nobody has made any effort towards me, not genuine effort. All I get is "do a detox" (ie have a psychotic episode) and likeminded stuff in other words they're telling me to go crazy. I'm willing to go crazy as long as I can do it IN THEIR HOUSE. That will teach them to throw out platitude-ridden advice, when they see what happens when I "detox" and "go clean" as they believe clean is.

TIESTO/RALPH FRIDGE: PARADISE
when i went mad that time my shower kept saying "paradise paradise" after this song!



I'm not getting too wound up by Narcotics Anonymous and I refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I'm only doing one meeting per week at the moment. You have to bear in mind I have bad memories of coming to NA having heard voices all the way there on the bus, then locking myself up in a dark room with them in a psychotic state only for them all to believe I was high on crack when I was "high" yes, but on nothing! Just like you I have only a certain tolerance for such bullshit and then I start feeling genuinely upset. You see I know the name of my disorder now and it's not a good one. Now I have to tell the Social Security this crap, which I don't want to, but they need to know. They do say any change in your condition should be notified to us so fuckit I'll notify them. What on earth they'll do with that information I hesitate to think. You see I had symptoms and knew I wasn't right. Then this doctor tells me in these same words "I think you have a mental illness". I have never thought of myself as "mentally ill" before. Depression is supposedly a mental illness but it didn't make me feel mentally ill. Only the crash from mania into depression has truly made me feel injured and ill. Very very sick and ill. The crash I had in December counts as one of five all time worsts. The fact that there are FIVE not one probably says a lot but I'm not dwelling on that one. Do you understand why I disengage rather than wallow? If I wallowed I would never get out of self pity and it would destroy me. I'd rather pretend nothing is wrong than wallow in the wrongness. I don't care if I'm doing the wrong thing; life is so very difficult I don't know what else to do.

TRANCE VISIONS: PARADISE (KOMAKINO REMIX)



Well I hope I've been grown-up enough today I don't feel grown up. I feel like the parent of a 3 year old child ~ as per usual ~ saying "DO THIS! DON'T DO THAT!" and the recalcitrant child barely listens..!

And how was YOUR DAY? rsvp!


RALPH FRIDGE: PARADISE (PUSH MIX)

Come down now

I THINK I HAVE COME DOWN NOW. Down to normality. I still felt excessively cheerful even yesterday, which I'm hardly complaining about; it was fantastic; but I knew it was the back end of a mood-swing, just as uncharacteristic breeziness can be the back end of a hurricane.

This is what gets me worst about being "ill". Judging normality in the context of sickness. If I don't I'm not going to know if/when it happens again. It's always come back before.

I don't want right now to go into a list of times I've gone up, but it's happened at least 5 times, probably 10 times. Some of those times can be blamed on a drug. Others can be blamed on "viral infection" (colds/flu). Depression I've had far more of. I first got depressed enough to be thinking of dying when I was only 10.

I'm not angry about not having been "treated" ~ how do you treat a depressed child? I wouldn't want my kid on meds. Talk therapy I don't think would have worked on me, not at that age. (It did work when I had it later. I'm only wary of it now from having got to a stage when almost nothing at all in my life feels personal to me. It's all just some story I've told endless times to endless professionals.) What does feel personal are the memories I share with my family. The times I shared with them when growing up feel more dear to me now than they felt at the time. In a sense my treatment was the good treatment I got off my family. And you need to bear in mind the worst of this depression occurred over 2 periods both about a week long, over about 2 months. Then, after that I was more OCD than depressed.

I saw a thing on TV where two men who had been in constant, severe depression for over a decade and one woman who had been in a parallel state on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (couldn't stop counting backwards, etc) had psycho-laser-surgery into the bit of their brain handling emotions.

All three made a dramatic recovery. One had to have a touch-up job when depression returned, but he was OK. Point being OCD and depression, including bipolar depression, were situated at precisely the same point in the brain. Which explains to me how I switched one "diagnosis" to another. Of course I don't have an official diagnosis as no dr. heard about this till 10 years after the fact. When I was depressed again. This time at university.

That was the worst depression of my life. I got badly depressed on heroin. You could say this was worse because at university I wasn't suicidal, not most of the time. On the heroin I was. And I was seeing nasty twisted faces in the carpet, in piles of clothing, in discarded carrier bags. I also heard voices. But the faces happened most frequently. Every day at some points. I think back to that time in horror of what might have happened had I been persuaded to drop that heroin. Considering this was depression WITH self-medication. What would it have been like with no meds bar methadone (which does almost nothing bar keep my body from being sick). As the dr. said it probably was "depression with psychotic features" ie as bad as depression gets. THIS is why I'm scared. This is why I HATED having that psych evaluation the other week while so hyper people couldn't follow what I was saying. Or had to keep putting me back on-topic.

[I hated the psych evaluation because it threw up rubbish from years ago I just did not and do not want to think about.)

But this 45 minute (was it really that short? It took up 5 hours of mental time I'm telling you!) this psychiatric history the guy had to take, before a Very Attractive TV Girl Doctor with shiny tights, really shiny black leggings that looked absolutely amazing and I felt myself light up when she came in (gave myself well away on that one)... (she must have looked over his report) and asked more questions along the same lines: not sleeping, going too fast, irritable mood T-ing into euphoria, paranoia, voices. I don't think they covered visions, which I also had that day. Their magnolia wall turned into the most amazing movie. I was hearing voices enough that rushing along their corridor every single room had babble emanating out.

This was the day I played aeroplanes on a swivel chair, like a 3 year old. Nobody was watching. I was in a private room, away from the receptionist. The whole point of a mental hospital, apart from saving your life is to give you somewhere to be crazy, so this behaviour is OK there, and doesn't contribute to your notes, unless it's done on a ward, in which case you're being "observed" they want to know how much energy you have on different days to see whether it's going up or down or is same every day... all that stuff. I know about moods from my little library of "how not to be" Depressed Books. Which I sold years ago.

Last night I kept having flashes of what I hoped wasn't depression. I don't feel depressed now. Not hyper, not depressed. Not slightly hyped up (which is really really nice). So I'm just lazy and lacking the amazing energy I had.

Going UP was too quick, but coasting down I really felt good, the way you coast down at the end of a rollercoaster. The going up happened so fast and with such paranoia and irritability it wasn't really good. But I had a fine week last week, even though I knew really I was coming down. I kept hoping I was going up again.

The things that might sound scariest to you weren't necessarily worst for me. Euphoria of course feels wonderful, grandiose is great. Paranoia I tended to get more when I was on the way into or out of the Ultra State. Going so fast I couldn't think any more, that was the worst. That to me is true madness. No thoughts in the head just noise like racing cars, whizzing about. That was the time I made myself think French to bring myself out of it. Visual hallucination is amazing. (Twisted faces in carrier bags happened in depression and technically that's called illusion as the crumpled bag sets it off, true hallucination is like me staring at that wall and seeing Visions.) Voices are usually just echoing my own thought out loud, or making suggestions. Occasionally they are abusive in a name-calling way. I never hear voices ordering me what to do or conversing about me. Those voices are said to be more characteristic of schizophrenia.

I went to a schizophrenic forum yesterday and couldn't relate to the level of paranoia. If I was "psychotic" it was in a much more fragmented way, where nothing adds to a whole, it's just weirdness. Not as frightening, as you might expect, when it actually happens. A lot was just funny e.g. the stairs exclaiming "oink oink poink poink!" as I descended to the front door. (Another illusion: the sound acts as trigger to a reinterpreting brain).

So that's what it's like to go mad. The peak lasted about 2 weeks. The week before I was horribly depressed some days, irritable and telling an anonymous commenter to F off, because his rapidly skimmed words seemed to be having a go. I repeated myself twice and thought "hang on a sec you're getting a bit vehement here..." but I didn't understand my own behaviour. So I was probably up for about 3 weeks in total. As I say the going-into stage is very hard to discern. Y'all might remember I was starting a mood, sleep and drink diary. I obviously felt some need for a mood scale going up as well as down, and that just about puts the issue in a nutshell. I knew I wasn't right.

I'm seeing a shrink once monthly. I'm on risperidone 2x2mg daily. Today I take it with methadone one mornings, one nightly. 4mg is half the usual maximum for bipolar; 40% of the usual max for schizophrenia. There's a chance I could have a "substance-induced mood disorder" (as well as pre-existing depression) ~~ but what substance is setting it off. Considering I WASN'T in withdrawal in December, most definitely wasn't in January, was ON heroin when I was hyper before (but not crack) was on heroin and crack (Mondays only) when antidepressants set me off badly one time before... blah blah it doesn't seem to phase in with anything. True withdrawal or switching off heroin on to anything eles has set me off high or low every single time (Subutex was a high: music sounded amazing! So good on days 1 and 2 I wanted to dance outside.)... So I don't know I just don't know.

I've been told this "happens to everyone" well I haven't seen that. What I'm telling is precisely what happened and I know people with schizophrenia etc. I know what's mild what's severe mine was edging towards the latter. I don't know anyone who got it this bad from drugs. Anywhere. At Nutter Club earlier today, a bipolar woman said "when I was depressed at NA they told me it was because I wasn't doing the steps properly and they said come off my medication". I said "I decided I'm going to tell anyone who says that: yeah I'll come off psychiatric meds. Only if I can stay at your house." This caused uproarious laughter.

Have a nice day. I'm trying. It just feels weird being "normal". (And how long will it last!?)



*******

HAPPY DAYS!

GUY ON HEROIN: UNION SQUARE NEW YORK CITY
THIS GUY HAS HAD "FIRE DOPE" AS THEY CALL IT THERE ("PROPER GEAR" AS YOU'D CALL IT HERE).
IT'S WHAT HAPPENED TO ME QUITE A FEW TIMES. TIMES I REMEMBER IS WHEN I WAS STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF A ROOM NOT KNOWING WHAT DAY IT WAS. SOMETIMES I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE I WAS...




EH! DALLAS is coming back! JR will be shot again! (Sorry I got taken in by the Independent newspaper's pun. They mean shot on film. Ukkkh.)

Dynasty was nicer to look at. Better homes. Heather Locklear. Joan Collins. (Dallas had April Stevens). Dynasty had near-incomprehensible story lines. Dallas had so-called cliffhangers but how those stories dragged! Please Lorimar: faster, better this time!

Psych Clinic

I GOT VERY HYPER THIS AFTERNOON. SO HYPER I WAS LAUGHING MY HEAD OFF. I could not follow what anybody was saying, unless it was a formulaic receptionist (or psychiatric interviewer) type person.
Anything with twisting, turning or unexpected content had me rapidly lost. I got taken to the clinic by my druggie worker for being so out of it I couldn't follow him. Within half an hour I was repea pea pea pea pea pea pea pea pea pea peating words urds urds that didn't belongongongongongongongongongongongongong together and causing havoc in the waiting room where I couldn't help noticing three other people at the opposite pole. I did try and be considerate. I went exploring through double doors and ended up in a private room making abstract musical noises because that's what I was thinking.

I've not gone to NA. NA will have to wait. Sitting in a room full of poeple who believe I'm on drugs when I PROVED IT THIS AFTERNOON WITH A URINE SCREEN. Nothing but methadone. And benzos I don't remember taking.

I did keep wondering whether E and LSD were in my system, because this card didn't test for them. And acid, with it's quarter of a milligram blow-your-head-off speciality always used to be hard to test for.

The best thing to happen, bar causing havoc and breaking into an empty office and pretending to fly on a swivel chair was staring into a blank wall and watching the most amazing movie unfold in silvery-blue and psychedelic rainbow colours. The view behind my eyes was amazing. The lights in the psychiatric car park are particularly good. I think somebody deliberately added purple, green and yellow tinges to various ones just for manic people. Yes I was talking extremelyfast and according to my interviewer constantly derailing topic. I thought I was speaking quite reasonably. I also thought I was totally rational and normal until I got so euphoric I just could not stop cackling my head off.

The doctor seemed to think viewing "hallucinatory" voices as free entertainment was healthy not pervy. As I demanded to know. I expressed a lot of things LOUDLY AND VEHEMENTLY!!!!

But I'm home now. I mentioned not wanting to be sectioned only about 228,375,496 million times.

Akh I've got to go beddybyes now. I noticed myself coming down during the interview as when I first indulged in some ingingingiinginginginging I could not stop stop op op op op op for quite a few seconds sponge. among ung ung ung ung ung ung!! Then I could do it but not stop it (with the dr.) now I can't even utter syllables that first. I didn't stop moving nearly the entrie time I was there and noticed they gave up on getting me to sit during the interview. I was too hyper.

It was thinking in musical noises and clangangangangangs that bothered me, even as I came out of that most intense phase. I know I visibly frightened one horribly self-indulgent shouting and crying girl in the waiting room and frankly consider her so selfish and self-centred (I heard her endless display of phone-calling) and frankly I don't care. Better be frightening than abused. Especially in a psych clinic. That's what I think.

If I had gone in I'd have made sure to get wrestled to the floor and needle-stabbed. Don't think that would have been too hard, the state I wsa in. I was more hyperkinetic (not necessarily more high) than any maniac I've seen admitted. But I only remember two. And one was clearly exhausted.

By the way the theme of METHADONE NOT DOING ANYTHING TO HELP MY MENTAL HEALTH BY SHOVING MOOD SWINGS OF BOTH POLES INTO THE OPEN repeatedly rose its head.

I don't think I was being questioned re schizophrenia. I can't remember what I'm to do as far too fractured attention span. They didn't think it at all unusual that I can write but not read online. Yeah I can read snatches, but ask me the gist of an entire post and I'm lost or speaking about something else entirely before I ever reach your end point.

Today it was my cling-clang over musicality that got me I felt like such a nutter while I was doing some of it. Felt nothing but the vibe at other times. Realized staff had just floated past me without my noticing (rather disconcertingly) at others... My head's still a bit all over the place.

Well I hope I get FAR MORE EUPHORIC and a little less hyper.

No sleep since I don't know when. Not since yesterday late morning if I remember right. If you're obsessive enough and wish to know: you check.

Interestingly despite my hyperactivity and hilarious mood i was markedly less paranoid then yesterday. And the voices were less intense. And far less intense than early December when as I said I couldn't tell the difference between thinking and hearing. I remember that. And being rather confused by it. I have been and still am confused by a lot of things.

I'm not raising the spectre of severe mental illness in an Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Really am not up for being misunderstood (by people who assume you can only get high on drugs) and/or judged by rooms full of people, no matter how well meaning.

Hope y'all are OK. :-)

I really should try and get some sleep. It's supposed to make you less manic. And probably more depressed. I expect. So I'm scared of sleeping, but need to do it.

Drink/etc Diary Day 1 (Saturday)

I SLEPT! 4(ish)PM TILL 4AM. 12 glorious hours. I dreamt about this boy I went to school with at my 1st 2ndary school. He left midway through the first year because his parents moved to Bedford. Then came back, still living in Bedford. His Dad still worked in London or Hertfordshire (where we were) and drove him in every day. The time before when I slept, with the exception of an hour or 90 mins early Saturday morn was Thursday afternoon into Thursday evening when I dreamt I was in Madonna's house. I found a crappy old radio in the corner, picked it up and said "whose is this?" and Madonna said "that belonged to my mother". Then I realized I had really upset her and Madonna started ignoring me. Madonna's mother died when she was about 6. She says it was the worst thing to happen in her life.

OK I said I would do an alcohol diary. I had 2 cans, 1 litre. 7.5% ie 75mls alcohol, 7.5 units. Being as I partly couldn't and partly didn't want to sleep and was drinking quite a bit of black coffee, I set my mood from -.15 to +1.5 peak then it dropped back to -1.5 because I was exhausted I felt sick, hungry but couldn't eat.

OK IF YOU'RE AS BORED AS ME OF MENTAL HEALTH SHIT SKIP THE ITALICS.

The mood scale works like this. Zero means absolutely normal and not at all depressed. If something funny came on telly I would laugh my head off. If something good happened I would feel really good. -1 is noticeably depressed but able to shrug it off, except it returns within half an hour. I distract myself a lot by using the internet. -2 is the higher end of "moderate" on a doctorly scale meaning feeling pretty rough but still able to act out, sometimes snap out of it except it crashes back, still able to use distraction. I could sleep 10 hours every night. -3 is the worst I usually get, lower end of "moderate" meaning absolutely abysmal mood. Whereas suicide crosses my head in any low, here the impulse or fantasy to do it can get relentless and I just want to curl up and die. Self-esteem goes low, concentration is terrible, I can write but not read much. I can sleep 14-17 hours or longer every day. -4 is very rare for me, I've only ever been down here for hours or days at a time, it means total incapacitation, staring into space, unable to put on any meaningful act. I feel broken and injured, totally worthless, guilty and filthy. I don't feel suicidal, this has always felt like the very end, life is over. You can start tripping out in this state but I've never tripped intensely (thank God). -4.5 would be so bad I wouldn't be blogging at all, not even single lines. I hope I never go that low. In this state they'd seriously think of ECTing you. ECT is the treatment I least want. I know someone who had it and had half a life wiped away. Google ECT, you'll find witness to this fact. Look at what doctors say, they'll never admit it happens apart from "partially impaired short term memory loss". Yeah I know a lot about this subject I used to have a stock of how to (or rather how not to) books with titles like Depression Workbook. Ukh. Lent them all away and sold the rest for heroin money.

O crap, now I have to explain pluses. OK here we go. When we get to the + and - 2s and higher bear in mind not everything happens at every moment, most things happen at some time while it's going on:

+1 hyperthymia means a good mood, a really nice buoyant good mood like swimming floats you cannot push it down in my late 20s I'd get like this, constantly, days at a time, but it always meant depression was on the way or I'd just come out of it (ain't life great); +2 hypomania racing thoughts or thoughts flooding the head, distractable, disinhibited, pacing, euphoric and/or irritable, like being on speed. Urge to say stupid stuff, eg repeating same words/phrases over and over, or doing it in head. I used to get flashes of this over the past few years, I just thought it was the heroin now I'm not too sure. +3 mania very disinhibited, saying inappropriate things though I'm not an impulsive person and try not to, periodically rushing high alternating with crystal clear shining mental state, irritability tipping into rage: especially at psychiatrists and drug services, endless composition of letters, posts, monologues in head or online, cannot sleep more than 4 hours max, bad paranoia, don't want to go outside. I was in this state when I saw the shrink last time (unfortunately, now I can't get out of what I rantingly told him), some hallucinations eg hearing words spoken by the tap when it runs +4 hearing voices, floridly at the peak, visual hallucinations e.g. seeing fur growing out of everything, flashes of light, Northern Lights style visuals, lights outside look amazing, police car lights make me ecstatic, extreme paranoia, people are talking about me, intruders in the house, irrational thinking though I'm a very sane person and can still distinguish or remember what's meant to be normal. Like the effects of an extreme crack/uppers binge when you've lost it and just cannot come down. No sleep at all at the very peak. Head feels like national electricity grid wired through brain. Eyes closed my mind is lit up like a TV set, brightly with constant moving pictures. This is what happened in early December it was only this bad for about 2.5 days. Into this got mixed depression of the worst type and suicidal urges which were extreme and terrifying. I wasn't even thinking English at some points just bing bing bang bong ong ong ong! Still able to write and post despite all this. Can't get head round stuff like texting on phone, signing into email, putting key in lock though. Bear in mind I can type by touch so typing is dead easy +4.5 you'd be totally incoherent, wouldn't know what you were doing, where you were going, why you were there, what was happening, could do anything and not know it. Never been this bad, but was able to see this was where it would end up if it got any worse. I've witnessed this from the outside (in nuthouse) it's not pretty. I'm glad I never got this far.

+3 and +4 have only happened once, in December. In summer 2001 I got into a horrible state coming off gear cold turkey, very hyper very depressed. Kept losing touch with what was thinking, what was going on at times. Everybody feels mentally terrible but it was more extreme. This isn't just my opinion the nutnut nurse at the druggie service thought it sounded "manic". Antidepressants (Prozac) used to put me +2 for a few days to a couple of weeks. Last time it was worse and I didn't sleep for 4 days, though i don't remember feeling that euphoric I wrote some ridiculous stuff in a letter to my Gran, I'm so glad I didn't post it. Then I crashed, still on mirtazapine (Remeron/Zispin), still at 30mg a day it bottomed out at -4. For 3 or 4 weeks until someone realized what was going on and I stopped it. I never even knew an antidepressant could make you worse.

OK so that's the scale and it's rated conservatively, you give the minimum applicable number. Feeling really nice for a few minutes doesn't mean a plus whatever that's just feeling really nice. These moods are constant and marked and the more extreme they get so the ability to act normal or snap out of it diminishes, eventually vanishes.

Ukh I'm fed up of all this. I wish I had never seen that dr. I had to. What am I meant to be doing? Cleaning my house. Going to AA. Yeah. House has turned into mess as life turned to chaos this past week. I'm not always the most focused person. Yet I can focus fairly well in certain ways. And nearly everything I am, think and/or feel I'm also the opposite. So I try not to be self indulgent but what is a blog? Self-indulgence of the most extreme kind! Life is like that it doesn't bother me unduly. I'm bothering me far more than anyone else ever has. My own behaviour. Drink drink drinking (still). I shouldn't be drinking 7.5 units a day that's double the maximum recommended allowance. I should be cleaning up. I should be nicely well organized. I should be physically clean. I should cook food from scratch because I know how to do it. I should get up at the same time every day so my sleep cycle is as regular as it can be. I should look through mail that comes and open stuff addressed to me. I should wash my clothes, not sleep in them and buy or at least obtain new ones (you can get free clothes by diving a clothing recycle bin). You can also collect them off the street, which I do. I should also do a million other things I cannot remember/be bothered going into.

That's it. See ya. Wouldn't wanna be ya. Wouldn't wanna be me either. Ha ha har!!!!

Illustrated: top Madonna; bottom Trisch Li or Trishli who appeared in video 1 on Friday manic +3 or more on my lovely scale. In video 2 she's sane and looks amazing. She died 2 years ago. I don't know why. I like her.
You can also find some good links re cocaine or crack psychosis or mood episodes and mixed mood disorders and other nauseating things

PS if you want to see more Trisch Li and Jen on the telephone here's 3 more:

Trisch and Jen on phone 3 Jen's weird night



Trisch Li and Jen on the phone 4



Trischli and Jen on the phone 4 later that night I love the background on this one